I’m done with Garmin

I feel you, brother. Garmin is not serious anymore. Plus, their support sucks now despite being great less than 2 years ago. I don't think they are interested in the wearable market that much, which is why your last sentence above is also my pledge.

Brisk Walker said:

My FR955 will be my last Garmin watch

Amen.

Support now asks me to diagnose other problems, not just the one I'm trying to report else they threaten to not bother investigating.   It is pointless contacting support anyway because it can take years for problems to get fixed.

Absolutely agree. It’s absurd that people pay premium prices for new devices plagued with issues, only to end up doing their testing for them. Then the next model is released and the cycle repeats!

I mean, what’s the point in owning a feature packed device if its constant issues make it unreliable and stressful to own?

The hardware’s great. The real issue is the software, all because Garmin are intent on churning out models faster than they can properly develop and test.

Very disappointing. Unless they get their act together, this business model will be as successful as their software releases. At least the horses have trackers now right—is there even a demographic left that doesn’t have a dedicated model?

I am not so sure about the hardware either. Plenty of reports of broken hardware, including damaged flash memory and screen problems. Even if it sometimes appears to be a software issue, it has a hardware cause. For instance, when the watch restarts inexicably, or the battery depletes fast after a sw update, most of the time it's the flash memory gone bust. Garmin knows that and offers a replacement (most of the time paid) although people ask for a sw fix.

I have a long list of grievances too. 

Ultimately, I think the bottom line is it's not just Garmin but many companies give maybe 70% effort and can still be the market leader and rake in tons of profit.

Not all companies are like that. I think the difference is some software / hardware folks that consistently put out a good product are the same ones that actually use said product.

Intervals.icu come to mind

I talked my wife into moving from fitbit to garmin a couple of weeks ago because she was excited to be able to hear 1 min heart rate alerts with her vivoactive 6.   Imagine how embarrassed I was to tell her that Garmin broke her watch before she even got it....    She left fitbit because it was horrible,  now she is getting about the same experience out of Garmin.

Here is whats not working for me that is killing the way I train and or have been training..   Mind you,  I've spent nearly 10k on their products and I'm fuming mad..

1.  No more 1 min heart rate alerts on my Enduro 3,  Vivoactive 6 and Edge 1040 bike computer.

2.  No voice navigation on my edge 1040 through my android phone because of the broken Connect update.

The things that I rely on the most and all broken and the worst part is,  Garmin is in no hurry to roll out some quick fixes for their bread and butter features...

A hike without voice navigation turns my Garmin into a piece of junk…

I agree with all of your points here. I've had better experience with Coros, great features that work,at more reasonable prices. 

It's pure insanity that they take anymore than 12 hours to fix these core issues...     I think Garmin is like a money-grabbing bloated, hedonistic sloth..  I couldn't be more disappointed with the turnaround time on fixes for core features..  I'm seriously thinking about reaching out to amazon and sending back nearly 10k worth of gear because I have enough proof how lazy Garmin has been with saved post and other bug reporting...    Customer support is good to me so if I ask they will refund me.. I'm going to give them a couple weeks to make this right but if I'm still waiting on thiese fixes I'm getting all my money back..

I agree 100% with the comments in this thread. Here's my rant:

I "upgraded" from a FR245 Music to a FR165 Music. First thing I noticed was when fast forwarding or rewinding MP3s, the music player jumped by 1 minute and 50 seconds at a time. Bizarre, right? Standard is to only jump 10 seconds or so. I submitted a bug report on this forum in April (it was ignored) and also contacted support by email.

I checked every new beta software release for a fix that never came. However, in doing so I discovered that they introduced a new bug in beta version 24.07 that caused the elapsed time displayed to reset to 0:00 when using FF or RW. Subsequent uses of the FF or RW feature will be from where the display "thinks" the current song is, not the point that is actually playing. I submitted a bug report for this immediately as well, and it was also ignored. Eventually that second bug made its way into the "stable" firmware.

Finally about a week ago I emailed about the status of these bugs, and was told "At this time the engineers have not found a solution and have not presented a timeline to fix this".
Um, are you serious? You couldn't AT LEAST roll back the change in which you introduced the second bug I reported?

Some other questions I have for Garmin:

• How can it be that in the year 2025 your engineers cannot figure out how to create a functioning MP3 player? Playing MP3s is a solved problem, and has been for years. There are probably even open-source software libraries that could be used. Your player literally cannot keep track of where it is within the song when seeking to another point.
  
  
• How can you justify charging a higher price for a watch that plays music, but with broken software? Especially when you likely have no intention of fixing it.
  
  
• Do you do ANY testing before releasing software? The bugs I reported would be caught with the most basic testing. These are not rare edge cases - they affect core functionality in 100% of the circumstances. If I was a developer, I would be embarrassed to ship software with these bugs. And if I did, I would want to fix them ASAP (in the very next release).
  
  
• Why am I (the end user) downloading beta versions, submitting bug reports/videos/system images only to be ignored? I'm doing Garmin a FAVOR by doing their testing for free. The least they could do would be to take these submissions seriously.

All I want to do is track my running, and listen to music while I do it. Seems like that shouldn't be too much to ask, right? I will definitely  be looking at Coros in the future.